Chrome version 57 was released about a week ago with a nice feature called Tab Throttling that throttles individual background tabs by limiting the timer fire rate for background tabs using excessive power. The result will make your battery last longer on your laptop. However, even though it’s a nice feature that doesn’t affect most of the music streaming protocols, there will be things impacted by this feature.

If you find you need your background tab as active as the front ones, here is a Chrome flag you can use to disable the Tab Throttling feature.

Go to the following Chrome flag location,

chrome://flags/#expensive-background-timer-throttling

Select Disabled from the drop-down menu.

Click Relaunch Now button at the bottom of the page.

And you are all set once the browser is rebooted.

Alternatively, you can also create a special Chrome shortcut on your desktop with the switch “disable-background-timer-throttling” to launch Chrome with the feature disabled automatically for you.

You can make a copy of the current Chrome icon first by using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V keyboard shortcut. Right-click the newly copied icon and choose Properties. Then replace the Target line with the following:

chrome.exe --disable-background-timer-throttling

The special shortcut approach may work better as the flag could be removed by the Chrome team at any time in the future. And once it’s removed, the option will stop working.